Where Else Can You Read about Games and Cultural Heritage?

While Play the Past is no doubt your favorite and most important source of smart, scholarly explorations of games and cultural heritage, we know we are not the only people writing about the intersection of meaningful play, history, and culture.

I wanted to take the time in this post to highlight a few other sources of criticism, reviews, and discussion of games and cultural heritage, with an emphasis on open access venues. And I also invite you to use the comments to add your own favorite journal or blog to the list.

Scholarly Journals

Games and Culture – a subscription-based journal published by Sage with an emphasis on videogames and the social sciences

Games Studies – an open-access, international journal covering a variety of disciplinary (and occasionally, designer) perspectives

eludamos – open-access, international, and multidisciplinary, ELUDAMOS makes forays into territory very familiar to Play the Past readers

Loading… – the official (open-access) journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association, Loading… often features articles that focus on videogames and narrative

Blogs

There’s no end to the blogs devoted to videogames (or games in general). Mainstream blogs like Kotaku or Gamasutra occasionally feature longer articles that address cultural heritage and games, but of more relevance are the blogs of individual academics and journalists who write about games and culture. Ian Bogost‘s writings are a lightning rod for game studies, while Grand Text Auto aggregates the individual blogs of a number of important figures in game studies, such as Nick Montfort, Mary Flanagan, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Clive Thompson writes about games for Wired and The New York Times, and he often links to or reproduces his articles on his own blog, Collision Detection.

Other Sources

There a host of other sources to consider if you’re interested in games and cultural heritage. The Well Played series of books from ETCPress is full of close-readings of videogames, though the quality of individual chapters is uneven (the books are not peer-reviewed). The archive of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference contains some gems, though you’ll need to dig around to find them.

What Else?

What else is there? This smattering of sources should only be the start of a roundup of writing relevant to Play the Past readers. We encourage you to add your own must-read journals, blogs, and book series in the comments!

Truly great resource, yet Play the Past initially strikes as just a tad continentally centric, despite our whole world out here, why even in our near bankrupt lickle island we have a community site that has been offering info, opinion, articles, resources while connecting, industry, academia and the general gamer / student populations for about seven years now: http://www.gamedevelopers.ie/home/

Michael – thanks for your comment. Couple of things to note. First off, Play the Past is focused exclusively on games for (and in) cultural heritage – as opposed to being a more general game design/game studies/industry oriented publication (sich as your own site). Second we are always looking for new contributors – regardless of where they hail from. The composition of authors has more to do with our own existing scholarly social networks than a desire to exclude any non-north american contributions.

Kind thanks to you Ethan for your response. I had gleaned the focus, just thought a suggestion re broadening your catchment/engagement(as opposed to that focus) may have enriched the depth of future investigations/discussions.

There was some excellent work being done under the banner of ‘entertainment computing’ both in Europe & Asia, elements of which struck me as being perhaps in a similar vein to technological elements of your ‘gamifying’ idea. The site I mentioned isn’t mine, just an example of a little outpost of endeavor where, like others such as http://www.dichtung-digital.de/ and to answer Mark Sample’s Question, I can read about games and cultural heritage. If perhaps in a little less focused way (-:

About Play the Past

Collaboratively edited and authored, Play the Past is dedicated to thoughtfully exploring and discussing the intersection of cultural heritage (very broadly defined) and games/meaningful play (equally broadly defined). Play the Past contributors come from a wide variety of backgrounds, domains, perspectives, and motivations (for being interested in both games and cultural heritage). More information on all of our contributors can be found here. A full rundown of our community and commenting policy can be found here. If you are looking to get in contact with us (for whatever reason), point your browser here and drop us a line.